A Bureaucratic Hassle, But Worth It

The phone call from the Universal Service Administrative Co. can
mean only one thing, Betsy Sakasitz knows: more red tape involving the
Bethlehem Area School District's E-rate application. This time, a staff
member of the federal agency needs a bid number for a contract the
district signed several years ago.

"They might ask us any question under the sun and expect we can
go right to the answer," a frustrated Sakasitz says as she searches
through an 8-inch-high stack of folders on her lap.

She pulls out a form and hands it to her boss, Scott R. Garrigan,
the network coordinator for the 14,000-student district in eastern
Pennsylvania. He says it isn't the right one.

So Sakasitz plunges back in and tries again.

"Bingo! That's it," Garrigan says.

By itself, USAC's request is just a small inconvenience. But
Garrigan estimates that he and Sakasitz have each spent between a
fourth and a third of their time on the job for the past three years
handling paperwork for the E-rate program—time that he says they
could have used to develop educational services over the district's
computer network.

"We have only a few people to implement this monstrous network, and
to have the E-rate take all this time is a real kick," Garrigan
says.

But to some extent, this is a problem he's happy to have. Both
Sakasitz and Garrigan say the hassles of the program are well worth the
results.

With 30 percent of its students eligible for free or reduced-price
lunches, the Bethlehem district receives a 60 percent E-rate discount
on services and equipment. In the first two years of the program, the
district parlayed that discount into more than $700,000 worth of E-rate
awards. Among other hardware necessities, the money paid for the
switches, routers, and fiber- optic cabling to upgrade the district's
computer network. The district also expanded its T-1 line Internet
connection to a T-3 line, which permits many more people to use the
Internet at the same time and to download such material as video or
large images without bogging down the network.

"We've been able to meet emerging demand," Garrigan explains.
"Before the E-rate, we were just beginning to have faculty and student
use of the Internet. What it's permitted is a massive use of the
Internet without students and teachers noticing any degradation of
services."

Garrigan's biggest complaint with the E-rate program is that the
people who designed the application process didn't understand how
schools work, he says.

Initially, for example, the annual E- rate cycle matched the
calendar year rather than a fiscal year that begins in, say, August,
which schools customarily use for their budgets. That policy has since
been changed.

But the rules are still full of requirements that only make sense to
"the lawyers" who wrote them, Garrigan says.

For instance, schools have to conduct a national bidding process for
all E-rate contracts—a policy that is intended to help reduce
costs.

In fact, says Garrigan, it often isn't practical to hire nonlocal
companies because they may have difficulty rounding up technicians to
fix problems in a timely manner. So he designed his requests for bids
in such a way that they could likely be met only by local
companies.

"The burden for doing this in a way we get the benefits is totally
on us," Garrigan says. "To try to envision the problems way out takes
enormous planning."

In addition, he says, the E-rate rules are too inflexible.

For example, the district was unable to use $25,000 in discounts it
was awarded during the program's first year for a particular company to
expand a wide-area network leased by the district. The company changed
management and no longer wanted to carry out the work, but the
program's rules didn't allow the district to switch vendors for the
expansion without losing E- rate aid for leasing the network.

Garrigan figures the district lost another $12,000 in E-rate awards
for Year 2 because it had stated on its application that it would
receive one combined bill from two vendors providing Internet and
telecommunications services; in fact, the billing was done through
separate bills from each of the vendors. USAC's Schools and Libraries
Division said it wouldn't pay the bills, so the district had to pick up
the costs itself.

‘The incentives are very strong. We almost can't afford
not to apply. ’

Scott R. Garrigan,
Network Coordinator,
Bethlehem Area School District

Then, there's the problem of how long it often takes the SLD to let
schools know the status of their requests. For Year 3, in which
Garrigan requested more than $500,000 in discounts, he received letters
granting or denying some requests eight months after submitting his
district's application— a time lag that he says makes planning
difficult.

Garrigan is by no means the only school technology leader who has
run into such problems with E-rate applications. Several people serving
on the Federal-State Joint Board on Universal Service, which makes
recommendations to the Federal Communications Commission on how to
operate the E-rate, acknowledge that the application process needs to
be simplified.

"We wanted to make sure we could track the dollars," says Laska
Schoenfelder, a co-chairwoman of the joint board. "We became so
obsessed with the fact that people would get the money for the right
purposes that it was too bureaucratic."

Despite his complaints about the program, Garrigan plans to apply
for E-rate discounts every year. "The incentives for a district that
has a reasonable level of poverty are very strong," he says. "We almost
can't afford not to apply."

Vol. 20, Issue 3, Page 7

Published in Print: September 20, 2000, as A Bureaucratic Hassle, But Worth It

Notice: We recently upgraded our comments. (Learn more here.) If you are logged in as a subscriber or registered user and already have a Display Name on edweek.org, you can post comments. If you do not already have a Display Name, please create one here.

Ground Rules for Posting
We encourage lively debate, but please be respectful of others. Profanity and personal attacks are prohibited. By commenting, you are agreeing to abide by our user agreement.
All comments are public.